photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

The Ballard Center's home at 708 Elm St. in North Lawrence is pictured Thursday, Sept. 1, 2022. The nonprofit was the recipient of $400,000 in American Rescue Plan Act aid dollars that will help fund a building expansion.

For nearly 60 years, the Ballard Center has been serving community members through “family stabilization” services like rent and utility assistance, a food and clothing pantry, and affordable pre-K child care.

The nonprofit has been doing that work out of a 107-year-old building in North Lawrence, its home since 1964. The building has been renovated since the Ballard Center moved in, but never expanded.

Now, the lack of space in the building is starting to show.

“There’s not one place in this building where you can have a private conversation, not one,” the center’s CEO, Becky Price, told the Journal-World Wednesday during a tour of the center. “…You’ll often see staff running outside with their phones, because we work with clients where it really (needs to be) confidential, where it’s hard to have a conversation.”

The Ballard Center was one of 14 external agencies selected to receive a portion of Douglas County’s remaining American Rescue Plan Act funds in July. The nonprofit was granted $400,000 to help fund a building expansion.

Leaders with Ballard told the Journal-World that the planned 2,400-square-foot expansion will add an entirely new pantry space and office wing, intended to be used for the center’s family stabilization services. Kyle Roggenkamp, the Ballard Center’s director of family stabilization and development, said it would open up space that’s currently in use by extension, and will be a crucial step in giving the nonprofit the room to take on more support staff like interns.

photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

A site plan for the expansion shows that it will be constructed on the west side of the building, right off N. 7th St.

Roggenkamp called the project a “generational game-changer.”

“It’s a long time coming,” Roggenkamp added. “Our capacity to serve has outpaced our building space for a long time; we’ve just had to get so creative with it to make it work. We’re too stubborn to say, ‘Oh, we can’t serve more people because of our space.’ We just keep doing it.”

The expansion comes at what is shaping up to be a crucial time for the Ballard Center. In August, the nonprofit served 74 households with more than $74,000 in crisis funding, which Roggenkamp said is the most households they’ve ever served in one month. In the last three months, the nonprofit has served as many folks using crisis funding as it did through the entirety of 2021. Those were households facing evictions, utility disconnections, and working families in need of vehicle repairs facilitated through the help of mechanics affiliated with the center’s stabilization network.

Roggenkamp said it’s important to realize numbers like that are attached to real people, though — households, children, people with emotions and heartbeats.

“Every one of those numbers is a member — or members — of our community that, without everyone else’s support, would be suffering even more,” Roggenkamp said. “…Numbers are great, numbers are powerful, but remembering that every number is a human being, I think that’s even more powerful.”

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To illustrate the current lack of space, Roggenkamp told a story about a family he recently worked with. A distraught father walked in after his family’s water service was shut off. They were new to Lawrence and he had to self-report his hours at his new job in order to be paid on time, but it had slipped his mind the previous Friday. But there was nowhere in the building private enough for the two to talk through what was going on, so they were forced to talk outside, sitting under a tree.

“We’re doing care coordination and crisis alleviation sitting under a tree, so that he can be open and honest about what they’re going through,” Roggenkamp said.

The same day, the family’s water service was turned back on after the Ballard Center stepped in. But that’s not where the conversation stopped, Roggenkamp said. Since the family of four with another child on the way was new to the community, they talked more about what other resources could help. Roggenkamp helped set the father up with Narcotics Anonymous meetings to help him maintain his four years of sobriety, and talked him through how to set up a Google Calendar alert so he was reminded each week to turn in his hours and ensure he’d be paid on time.

And that still wasn’t all. Roggenkamp had to move on to other clients that day, so he invited the man to join his family at the pool that weekend, where Roggenkamp’s son would be having a birthday party. The family showed up, and Roggenkamp set them up on the food pantry’s weekly schedule and a fuel card so the father could get to and from work.

Roggenkamp said the expansion will give the nonprofit enough space that meetings underneath a tree out front or at the neighborhood pool won’t be a necessity anymore.

Another example emphasizing the shortage of space is the center’s “break room” where employees can destress, which is actually just a nook sectioned off with curtains for privacy. Price said working with clients in tough situations can be a lot for the center’s staff to navigate in terms of processing their own feelings.

“When you hear their stories, when you know what’s going on with the child, when we know when they go home what’s happening, it’s really hard emotionally,” Price said. “So we support our teachers however we can.”

photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

A space for Ballard Center staff to destress and take some time to themselves is sectioned off by curtains, but that’s the only measure of privacy on offer. Leaders with the nonprofit say that because their clients are often working through traumatic situations, it’s important that the expansion allows for some more space for the staff members who work directly with them to breath when they need to.

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It’s hard to predict just how long it might take until the project is complete given the unpredictability of construction right now, but Roggenkamp said the goal is for it to be done in the next year. Before then, though, the nonprofit still needs to generate some more funding to get the project over the finish line. They’re planning to bridge the remaining gap by selling $150,000 in state tax credits.

Roggenkamp walked the Journal-World through how those credits work. The credits allow for donors to receive 50% of a donation back in Kansas tax credit that can then be used to lower their tax liability, or be taken as a refund if it’s over their tax liability. For a $10,000 donation, for example, the donor would receive $5,000 back in tax credit. In this example, if the donor itemizes that donation on a federal return and they’re currently at a 30% tax bracket, they’d receive 30% of their donation — $3,000 — as a federal tax reduction. After their state tax credit and federal tax deduction, a $10,000 donation will have turned into a net cost to the donor of $2,000.

“That’s why (the state does) tax credits; it’s to help leverage donation dollars and get the max amount you can for capital campaign projects like the addition or building renovations,” Roggenkamp said.